Debut Novels

They get a bit louder every year, the prognosticators of literary fiction’s demise, warning that novel readers will soon be abandoned to hack thrillers and paint-by-number romances.
Fortunately, they’re wrong. With their latest debut novels, independent publishers deliver a chorus of fresh voices, the best of which combine an invigorating originality with a self-assurance more typical of seasoned authors.
That may be all these writers have in common. It’s tempting to look for trends, but the happy fact is that these debut novelists are an eclectic group, defying a common label. Their books are whimsical, dark, hilarious, and wrenching. Some are all of the above.
Even better, because these books introduce new voices in fiction, each offers the thrill of discovery and the implied promise of more pleasure to come.

The Divine Economy of Salvation (Algonquin Books, 1-56512-365-4) begins with an oft-used device—a mysterious package arrives, wrapped in plain brown paper, no return address. A woman pries it open, hands shaking, the trembling of the guilty. The reader knows that inside lies something threatening.
For all its classic elements—including a hideous 25-year-old secret bubbling to the surface—this first novel by Priscilla Uppal is anything but stale. She writes like a natural storyteller, teasing the reader with the secret, revealing an inch at a time, shrouding the rest. When she finally casts the long-hidden event into the reader’s view, it appears at once shocking and inevitable.
The secret belongs to a nun. As a teenager in a Catholic girls boarding school, she participated in a trick that was meant to humiliate, but turned deadly. The story cuts back and forth between the convent in the present and the school twenty-five years earlier. Uppal, who lives in Toronto, calls to mind the doyenne of Canadian letters, Margaret Atwood, in her ability to evoke the unique strain of intimacy and cruelty that snakes through relationships between girls.
Showing that male relationships can be just as treacherous is White Male Heart by Ruaridh Nicoll (Justin, Charles & Co., 1-932112-04-9). If Jack London had rooted his prose deep in the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands, it might have sprouted something resembling this novel, which takes naturalism to its violent extreme.
The story centers on two young men, best friends since childhood, whose lives have been defined by isolation—physical and emotional. A worldly, slightly older woman comes to their rural village and takes up with one of them, straining the friendship and eventually igniting the most destructive impulses of both men.
The author writes convincingly about the affair, a relationship based on motives and emotions too complicated to be called love. The soul of the story, though, lies in descriptions of the visceral, ritualistic brutality of the friends’ deer hunting excursions.
Nicoll, raised in the Highland county of Southerland, has traveled widely as a journalist for publications including the London Observer. His keen reporter’s eye for detail and insider’s empathy make a potent mix.
At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, As High As the Scooter Can Fly by Lia Nirgad (The Overlook Press, 1-58567-313-7) is a charming fantasy that twists the traditional fairy tale into a pseudo-feminist caution against the dangers of playing it safe.
The heroine, Layla, is withering in a small suburban home with three daughters she loves and a husband she does not. “He was not an evil man, but he was slow and quiet and a cold, stagnant air wrapped him from dawn to dusk.”
When she accidentally discovers that the rusty old scooter in her yard can fly, her long-repressed desire for exploration begins to stir. Soon, the housewife who rarely ventured beyond her own yard is riding the scooter to far-flung places.
The author, a Belgium-born writer and translator who lives in Israel, uses deceptively simple language to tackle complex issues, including the perils of trading passion for security and the high price women pay for independence. After raising such weighty themes, Nirgad ultimately rescues Layla, in an ending befitting a fairy tale.
In contrast, Tilt by Elizabeth Burns (Sourcebooks Landmark 1-4022-0041-2), offers a more realistic portrait of a woman dealing with multiple problems from which there is no magical escape.
In the course of this engrossing novel, Bridget Fox faces the deaths of her father and her best friend, and the realization that autism will prevent her daughter from living anything resembling a normal life. As if that weren’t enough to handle, Bridget’s also busy breastfeeding her infant second daughter, adjusting to moving from New York to Minnesota, and trying to keep her manic-depressive husband from self-destructing.
The author makes her heroine compelling and believable. Bridget is funny, angry, sweet, and tough, as circumstances force her out onto the edge of her ability to cope. Burns exudes compassion for her characters, while avoiding sentimentality.
The same can be said of Rocco Lo Bosco, who sets his first novel, Buddha Wept (GreyCore Press, 0-9671851-8-1), in late 1970s Cambodia, during the horrific reign of Pol Pot.
The central character, Ona Ny, is given to trances and visions even as a young girl. This mystical quality, which her family indulges as an appealing quirk in their comfortable and prosperous days before the troubles begin, helps Ona’s spirit transcend the atrocities she later experiences and witnesses. Though Lo Bosco clearly has an affinity for the spiritual, there is nothing ethereal about the language and images he uses to depict the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge.
“A soldier would stand behind you while you labored and you would wait in terror to die, either by gun or knife or beating. Or in a moment of boredom or anger, the guard might ‘accidentally’ bump you into the ditch where you would be impaled on the stakes.”
The author wisely does not attempt to make sense of the unthinkable or to pretend that redemption is possible. What makes Buddha Wept ultimately a hopeful story is its portrayal of a woman who emerges from a time of crushing inhumanity with her own humanity strengthened.
In a much—much—lighter tone, The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg (Coffee House Press, 1-56689-139-6) offers the funniest send-up of academia since Jane Smiley’s Moo. The novel reads as if Ellenberg had started out to write satire, contracted an uncontrollable bout of the giggles, and exploded into all-out farce.
Third-rate Chandler State becomes, appropriately enough, ground zero for a field of study centering on a fourth-rate poet known as Henderson, who writes such extravagantly awful lines as, “The wanton whores of Germany gum up my sight.”
To Higgs, the professor responsible for Henderson’s resurgence, the poetry is so dreadful it’s sublime. “Henderson, in his hatred for the reader, for the female sex, for his adopted Germany—really, for everyone—had arrived at a sort of perfection of which ordinary and good poets could not be capable. His work was cleansed entirely of affect, wit and sense. And so, as he read, was Higgs.”
With logic like that, it’s impossible not to have fun.
Speaking of fun, Beware the Solitary Drinker (Poisoned Pen Press 1-59058-016-8) by Cornelius Lehane, combines the conventions of a standard mystery novel—including a deliciously complex plot, spiced by pornography, blackmail, lurid family secrets and an ever-changing menu of suspects—with a deftly drawn central character that lifts the book beyond its genre.
The story begins just as a mystery should. A lovely young stranger glides into a seedy bar at closing time. “She came through the smoke up to the bar, like one of those sleek and beautiful mahogany sailboats that slip soundlessly out of the fog and early morning mist.” says the narrator, Brian McNulty, a bartender who reluctantly turns amateur detective after the woman’s body is found in a park.
The author, a labor journalist and former bartender, draws an intriguing community of losers in an after-hours world where drink, drugs, and random sex are the most comfort anyone dares seek.
For all its noirish despair, that world looks as threatening as the meeting hall of a suburban Kiwanis Club compared to the universe created by Nava Renek in her first novel, Spiritland (Spuyten Duyvil, 1-881471-57-8).
Atmosphere trumps plot and character in this story of American graduate student Maddy Foster, who, with her boyfriend, hauls a backpack to Asia looking for adventure. In Thailand, she descends into a hell of drug smuggling and addiction. Renek makes Maddy’s bad decisions—and her deterioration—believable with powerful descriptions that plunge the reader into a disorienting swirl of heroine, sexual exploitation, disease, and poverty. Her prose conjures the feel of a relentless mid-day sun pressing down on a crowded street, the acrid taste of a cheap Thai cigarette, the stench of a room rancid with sweat and vomit. The language is vivid and often surprising.
“I was sweating because we’d been hiding in the bushes for some time, and I could feel Jake’s breath on my neck, quick and light, like a reptile keeping still in the hot sun.”

The list—as they say—could go on. The catalogs of the publishers mentioned in this article also contain other worthy first novels. It works that way. A smart wager says any editor passionate enough about fiction to nurture one fine novel is too hooked to stop at one. That’s a bet everybody wins.